This event missed the mark on the "WOW" aspect. There wasn't a single reward that would have me stare at the pull like "whoa, did that just happen???" I am no endgame player either (still Paragon, ca. 10 7*s, not a single r2/3), so if I look at my goals and their fulfillment:
Did I move toward new highest rank? No. Did I obtain rankup mats to improve my top champs? No. Did I get something, I would otherwise struggle to obtain? No.
I spent 5300 units total, in hopes of at least expanding my roster a bit. And I don't really feel like that happened.
Ironically, when I sat down to do SQ and a bit of 8.2 exploration during the holidays, I obtained comparable value of items, as I got from Banquet.
Hey everyone. I thought this would be a good place to share some of my closing thoughts on Banquet this year. This is not me making excuses, but just trying to be as transparent as possible about what I and the others responsible for the event were thinking as we learn from it and move into 2024.
I want to start by saying the team absolutely understands your concerns and we do care about them. The part of our community that engages in dialogue on our forums, YouTube, Reddit and other social media represents a slice of our most engaged, long-term fans. We absolutely want to surprise and delight you, and in the case of Banquet 2023, it’s clear for many of you that didn’t happen.
I think there are a few reasons why things ended up this way. The first was, as I said on one of our livestreams, we wanted to do everything possible to encourage people to do Necropolis by moving rewards away from offers and into content. We tuned rewards through the end of this year and into the first part of next year accordingly. This was successful, our engagement with Necropolis has exceeded even our highest expectations. However I do agree, despite this, that portions of the Banquet event ended up undertuned, particularly the rank-up materials in the milestones and ranked rewards.
The second reason is that internally, we valued the limited pool 7-star Gifted Guardians crystal higher than a lot of you did. To us, it carried enough value that it would make the milestones worth it. Overall, the player base seems to have agreed (more on this later), but clearly for some that was not the case.
The third reason is, as many have said here and elsewhere, the Banquet event is the one event that isn’t separated by progression, and over time, the gap from low progression to high progression increases. I don’t think I need to say any more about this, you all seem to have identified this already.
The fourth reason is that the Banquet crystals themselves are deliberately designed to not be great for our top players, but I think aiming for a certain mix of filler and high-quality chase rewards we still ended up slightly undertuned. There will always be filler in these crystals, that’s just the reality of the situation. If a player doesn’t like that, then the event isn’t for them. However about 83% of the crystal was filler for top players this year, and I do agree that’s too high. We went through something similar last year with the inclusion of T4CC but I think that this year there was an additional challenge. For top players 6-star champion acquisition materials are basically worthless and 7-star shards were still too valuable to make up a meaningful portion of the crystal. Without champion acquisition options to fill up the crystal, we ended up in a tough place.
With that all said I do want to address a couple concerns that I don’t agree with. The first is this idea that the people who tune these events don’t understand the game. I have seen various suggestions that we should hire more high-tier players to work on this content. This wasn’t a problem in this case. Of the seven people who worked on this event, two of us were Valiant before the start of December, two are high Paragon players who have completed Necropolis, and the remaining three are all either Paragon or Thronebreaker. If anything, compared to the population of our players, our team is top-heavy. We knew generally where this event would land and that the event wasn’t as good for our end game players compared to last year, relative to the current state of the game. Again, I think the main difference in perception is the value we placed on the Gifted Guardians crystals. The value we placed on that crystal took up too much of the “reward budget” and directly resulted in the rank-up resources being undertuned in the milestones. We also could have included some T4A in ranked rewards below the top 90, and probably some more 6-star 4 to 5 rank-up gems.
The second is that, despite a negative response from our engaged community, Banquet 2023 was broadly very successful. I’ll be honest, after seeing the initial reaction on these forums I was pretty worried. But in the end, players opened a lot of Banquet Crystals, approximately 34% more than last year. Part of this was that players had more Units going into the event this year, but a bigger reason was that, despite common belief, the Banquet event is actually one of our most broad-based sales events of the year - it’s one of our least top heavy events in terms of the percentage of participation coming from the top players. I know this is counterintuitive in some ways, given what it takes to climb the leaderboard, but it also makes sense when you think about how good the event was for lower-progression players. Broadly, the player base as a whole did think the Gifted Guardians crystal was worth completing the milestones for. So, if you want to argue the event was bad because it left many top players without the rewards they expected, by all means, make that argument, and I’m sympathetic to it. But if you want to argue it was bad because it wasn’t successful from the business and participation side you are going to lose that argument as it’s based on the false premise that the event failed, which it very much did not.
Finally, bringing things back to the question at hand: Are Kabam devs happy with the Banquet results? I can’t speak for everyone on the team, but I would say overall I’m neutral. On the plus side, we got more players into Necropolis, had a successful event with broad-based participation, and didn’t substantially devalue very much economically aside from the six Gifted Guardians. We still have a huge roster of unreleased 7-star champions, rank 3 materials and other champion items like sig stones and awakening gems that are holding substantial value. You could see a world where Banquet introduced 7-star awakening gems or sig stones, and it made more money in the short term, and players were happier, but long-term we were in worse shape. On the downside, a lot of our most engaged players are pretty unhappy right now, with the Banquet event compounding concerns about Alliance War, defender AI, the meta event and other legitimate issues we need to address. What I can say in closing is that we are listening and we are learning. We aim to surprise and delight as many of you as possible as we get into this new year.
As a long-term fan (I play since 2015), half-valiant and f2p player, I disagree with some things in this: 1-encourage player to play necropolis? What does that mean? Couldn't we delay our necropolis exploration? Like I did? Necropolis is permanent 😅 2- yeah gifted guardian crystal may be very valuable, or at least it would have been without sandman in the pool. That crystal was the main reason why I played banquet this year, in the hope of find adam warlock, instead I got a f****** sandman, my god. So, good but still not enough imo 3- The fact that ppl overall opened more crystal that last year is obvious, you needed to open more than last year to get all the milestones. I don't think these numbers match reality about how community feel with this event. 4- it was really undertuned, personally I expected at least more r4 and r5 material in milestones and low rank rewards
Personally I play what I find fun to play, so, banquet last year was fun and I gave it a chance this year... I don't say I regret but.... I am a bit disappointed (especially cause I pulled sandman lmao, wouldn't complain if I had pull one of the other 5 champs 🤣)
Hey everyone. I thought this would be a good place to share some of my closing thoughts on Banquet this year. This is not me making excuses, but just trying to be as transparent as possible about what I and the others responsible for the event were thinking as we learn from it and move into 2024.
I want to start by saying the team absolutely understands your concerns and we do care about them. The part of our community that engages in dialogue on our forums, YouTube, Reddit and other social media represents a slice of our most engaged, long-term fans. We absolutely want to surprise and delight you, and in the case of Banquet 2023, it’s clear for many of you that didn’t happen.
I think there are a few reasons why things ended up this way. The first was, as I said on one of our livestreams, we wanted to do everything possible to encourage people to do Necropolis by moving rewards away from offers and into content. We tuned rewards through the end of this year and into the first part of next year accordingly. This was successful, our engagement with Necropolis has exceeded even our highest expectations. However I do agree, despite this, that portions of the Banquet event ended up undertuned, particularly the rank-up materials in the milestones and ranked rewards.
The second reason is that internally, we valued the limited pool 7-star Gifted Guardians crystal higher than a lot of you did. To us, it carried enough value that it would make the milestones worth it. Overall, the player base seems to have agreed (more on this later), but clearly for some that was not the case.
The third reason is, as many have said here and elsewhere, the Banquet event is the one event that isn’t separated by progression, and over time, the gap from low progression to high progression increases. I don’t think I need to say any more about this, you all seem to have identified this already.
The fourth reason is that the Banquet crystals themselves are deliberately designed to not be great for our top players, but I think aiming for a certain mix of filler and high-quality chase rewards we still ended up slightly undertuned. There will always be filler in these crystals, that’s just the reality of the situation. If a player doesn’t like that, then the event isn’t for them. However about 83% of the crystal was filler for top players this year, and I do agree that’s too high. We went through something similar last year with the inclusion of T4CC but I think that this year there was an additional challenge. For top players 6-star champion acquisition materials are basically worthless and 7-star shards were still too valuable to make up a meaningful portion of the crystal. Without champion acquisition options to fill up the crystal, we ended up in a tough place.
With that all said I do want to address a couple concerns that I don’t agree with. The first is this idea that the people who tune these events don’t understand the game. I have seen various suggestions that we should hire more high-tier players to work on this content. This wasn’t a problem in this case. Of the seven people who worked on this event, two of us were Valiant before the start of December, two are high Paragon players who have completed Necropolis, and the remaining three are all either Paragon or Thronebreaker. If anything, compared to the population of our players, our team is top-heavy. We knew generally where this event would land and that the event wasn’t as good for our end game players compared to last year, relative to the current state of the game. Again, I think the main difference in perception is the value we placed on the Gifted Guardians crystals. The value we placed on that crystal took up too much of the “reward budget” and directly resulted in the rank-up resources being undertuned in the milestones. We also could have included some T4A in ranked rewards below the top 90, and probably some more 6-star 4 to 5 rank-up gems.
The second is that, despite a negative response from our engaged community, Banquet 2023 was broadly very successful. I’ll be honest, after seeing the initial reaction on these forums I was pretty worried. But in the end, players opened a lot of Banquet Crystals, approximately 34% more than last year. Part of this was that players had more Units going into the event this year, but a bigger reason was that, despite common belief, the Banquet event is actually one of our most broad-based sales events of the year - it’s one of our least top heavy events in terms of the percentage of participation coming from the top players. I know this is counterintuitive in some ways, given what it takes to climb the leaderboard, but it also makes sense when you think about how good the event was for lower-progression players. Broadly, the player base as a whole did think the Gifted Guardians crystal was worth completing the milestones for. So, if you want to argue the event was bad because it left many top players without the rewards they expected, by all means, make that argument, and I’m sympathetic to it. But if you want to argue it was bad because it wasn’t successful from the business and participation side you are going to lose that argument as it’s based on the false premise that the event failed, which it very much did not.
Finally, bringing things back to the question at hand: Are Kabam devs happy with the Banquet results? I can’t speak for everyone on the team, but I would say overall I’m neutral. On the plus side, we got more players into Necropolis, had a successful event with broad-based participation, and didn’t substantially devalue very much economically aside from the six Gifted Guardians. We still have a huge roster of unreleased 7-star champions, rank 3 materials and other champion items like sig stones and awakening gems that are holding substantial value. You could see a world where Banquet introduced 7-star awakening gems or sig stones, and it made more money in the short term, and players were happier, but long-term we were in worse shape. On the downside, a lot of our most engaged players are pretty unhappy right now, with the Banquet event compounding concerns about Alliance War, defender AI, the meta event and other legitimate issues we need to address. What I can say in closing is that we are listening and we are learning. We aim to surprise and delight as many of you as possible as we get into this new year.
3- The fact that ppl overall opened more crystal that last year is obvious, you needed to open more than last year to get all the milestones. I don't think these numbers match reality about how community feel with this event.
I think it's a combination of your point, and what Crashed said: summoners had more units when coming into this event.
Now he didn't say why but we all know why: cyber weekend was a disappointment as well. And even if banquet was a disappointment for most, we know most people have difficulties saving their hard earned units till let's say next 4th July event and just went for the banquet anyway. (I personally chose to save for longer cause the ceiling for offers is no longer 18k and we're going to see the first valiant offers next July).
So I think what happened is a combination of : harder to reach milestones + massive amount of units available as a consequence of disappointing cyber weekend.
You purposely created an event that was not intended for top players who are also your top spenders? And do you think that’s good business? As you stated, the majority of your development team had already beat necropolis. So you purposely released an event that you did not want top spenders or top players to compete in? After they have already beat necropolis(so you don’t want our money?)
Yet all the ranked rewards or geared towards mega spenders. So you’re essentially saying anybody who wants top rewards that’s a top player needs to spend top dollars. But he’s going to get nothing but garbage along the way. To these highly exclusive and rare items. Anyone who falls short wasted THOUSANDS of dollars because you offered nothing but trash along the way!
As a Valiant player, how useful are six star signature stones to you?
nothing that you said actually contains a logical reason why your company decided to release an ALLIANCE event that promotes spending and doesn’t reward the top one percent of spenders
In which way is this a success? Is it a success because the top player spent like 25% of what the top performers last year Spent?
Is it a success because 90% of your customer base is upset or at the very least disappointed?
Maybe it’s a success because you made millions of dollars and nobody actually got anything that forwarded their roster in any meaningful way? Ding ding there it is .. I keep forgetting that you are a gambling institution disguised as a video game. And the main goal is to get as many players to the table as possible. But just like Vegas, you don’t want anybody to feel like they won. Psychologically they need to be hungry and want to still keep on playing, hoping that the next spin is going to be the magical won the rewards them.
This is a sad, unscrupulous way to run a business. And as a company since every single thing you have is actually valueless you could’ve decided to make your customers happy by giving them “valueless items” that actually advance their progression instead
But that’s not how you operate. Instead, you’re probably happy hearing that players that only make $20 an hour in the real world like most of my friends. Spent a weeks or a month’s pay trying to help their alliance and hopefully their own progression, silly them I guess because kabam says this was a success.
Most businesses, don’t operate on the principle of trying to get as much from their customers as they can while giving their customers as little as possible Congrats you’ve outdone yourselves
I eagerly await all of the apologist to shred me insult me, while a company I myself just gave enough money to rank in top 600 stands by and does nothing (even though it’s against your terms of service to insult fellow players on the forums) proving again that the customer means nothing only the money they collect from them on the limited time they play the game matters.
I personally love when Kabam tells me what content I should be focused on for rewards. Makes the game so fun when they try to force game modes that I don't like, such as Battlegrounds and Everest content.
Kabam NEED to get things together, maybe hire someone who is at High Paragon/Valiant level to have an input on this or actually listen to the content creators feedback.
The idea that if only Kabam listened to "us" things would be better is hilariously naive. Not only do they have players of all progressions in the CCP who they listen to constantly, they have a similar range of employees actively involved in these decisions. They've hired top tier players as well.
As someone who converses with the developers regularly, and sees the chatter between players in the CCP and elsewhere, the notion that there's a bunch of insulated Kabam developers hopelessly ignorant of the genius players who could fix their game if only they listened to them is a hysterical fiction. First of all, there's no general consensus about how the rewards should work in the game, or for that matter anything else. There are players who think the banquet was hopelessly lame. There are players of all progressions who think it was perfectly fine. There are developers who think it should be different than what it was. Reasonable people can have differing opinions and perspectives on how these things should work, and what we get, not just with the banquet but everywhere, is a consensus compromise between a lot of different requirements and priorities, adjudicated by the designers who ultimately have to make the final decisions on things.
There's no voice here that is unrepresented there. When people here say Kabam should listen, they don't actually mean listen. They mean obey. And when they say they should listen to "the players" they almost always have one particular player in mind. I don't agree with every decision Kabam makes, and there's been many times I've been critical of certain aspects of the game, but there's no group of players I can think of that I would vote to hand control of the future of the game to, outside of the hands it is currently in.
And not because I think they are better players or smarter designers or anything like that. Just because they have the track record. For years people have been saying things like "they need to get it together" or "the game's going downhill" or "if they don't do this the game won't be around much longer." And yet, MCOC is a nine year old game that is still making hundreds of millions of dollars a year with hundreds of thousands of active players and millions of people still downloading the game and is still in active development. How many of those are there? And what do I attribute that to? I don't think it is the game play, there are lots of games with similar game play. And not the Marvel license: over the time I've been playing MCOC the graveyard of dead Marvel games is filled beyond capacity. In my opinion, its the game economy. The thing that people complain about the most, that people say Kabam is most out of touch about, that no one thinks Kabam ever gets right, is probably its single biggest strength, and always has been. That's the thing I wouldn't trust in any other hands, especially any player who thinks they know better.
Is this a joke response? I genuinely can't tell 🤣
I've been playing this game for the past 8 years, I speak to people who have also been playing the game for just as long, I follow countless content creators, see the forums on a daily basis and the people who are invested (the people who spend and keep the game alive) generally have the exact same/very similar consensus on things.
The things that Kabam had control over, just offers, cyber weekend offers, banquet event, new aw tactic, BG nodes, potions update, lack of store updates, lack of rewards updates are almost all received negatively by the players that actually have experience, spend money and have a right to have an opinion.
You're telling me all this is exactly how the game should be run? In a way which the most valued players aren't happy with Kabams decision?
I'm saying the games dying or anything like that in the slightest, what am I saying is Kabam is obviously ignoring the player base. example; last BG season had extremely low scores for the GC brackets, current war season has Masters level alliances not even trying which is a combination of **** nodes that the 'devs are happy about' and the extortionate potion situation and now Banquet event has had one the lowest spend in recent years as we can see from 2nd and 1st spending less than 100k between them compared to 120k for just one person last year.
Kabam have done some great things this year, but can and should be doing so much better... and every month they're being told by the player base what they want and getting feedback that goes unheard 🤷♂️
There's also another fundamental flaw with this line of thinking, and in my 9 years, I've seen it made endless times concerning Offers. Kabam has reiterated many, many times that not all Offers will appeal to all Players. This isn't some kind of copy-and-paste response. Some Offers are quite literally not meant to appeal to all Players. There's a tendency to think that everything is targeted at where we're personally at, and if we think it's garbage then it must be garbage for everyone. The belief is because we're the "most experienced", then we know what's best for all Players. This is a bit misguided because we don't speak for where all Players are at, and we can't speak for what appeals to all Players. One person's s&#^ is another person's stepping stone. Popular opinion only goes so far, and you need to take the demographic into account, and where they're at in the game.
Be careful, he might choke while gagging! You keep referring to “all” In defense of kabams response.
You do realize that in that response, they said “the Banquet event is the one event that isn’t separated by progression” this literally means that it applies to all players. It’s not separated by progression levels. Which means that the people at every level of progression should be able to benefit from the event. That includes people at the top and bottom, which is the definition of the word all.
Unless you are ignorant enough in all your bountiful wisdom, to believe that beginner players are the ones collecting the top rewards.
Because if you don’t believe that, then you, in fact know the top players and spenders are the ones that are going to get top rewards. And if you know that, then you also know that they are spending thousands of dollars and collecting nothing but garbage along their way to the top. So you’re OK with the idea that if someone wants to rank three champ they should have to spend $50,000 to do it if they’ve already beaten necropolis. And that’s actually all they’ll get because five star items and six*signature stones don’t make a difference to somebody with multiple rank threes and dozens of seven*champions.
Kabam NEED to get things together, maybe hire someone who is at High Paragon/Valiant level to have an input on this or actually listen to the content creators feedback.
The idea that if only Kabam listened to "us" things would be better is hilariously naive. Not only do they have players of all progressions in the CCP who they listen to constantly, they have a similar range of employees actively involved in these decisions. They've hired top tier players as well.
As someone who converses with the developers regularly, and sees the chatter between players in the CCP and elsewhere, the notion that there's a bunch of insulated Kabam developers hopelessly ignorant of the genius players who could fix their game if only they listened to them is a hysterical fiction. First of all, there's no general consensus about how the rewards should work in the game, or for that matter anything else. There are players who think the banquet was hopelessly lame. There are players of all progressions who think it was perfectly fine. There are developers who think it should be different than what it was. Reasonable people can have differing opinions and perspectives on how these things should work, and what we get, not just with the banquet but everywhere, is a consensus compromise between a lot of different requirements and priorities, adjudicated by the designers who ultimately have to make the final decisions on things.
There's no voice here that is unrepresented there. When people here say Kabam should listen, they don't actually mean listen. They mean obey. And when they say they should listen to "the players" they almost always have one particular player in mind. I don't agree with every decision Kabam makes, and there's been many times I've been critical of certain aspects of the game, but there's no group of players I can think of that I would vote to hand control of the future of the game to, outside of the hands it is currently in.
And not because I think they are better players or smarter designers or anything like that. Just because they have the track record. For years people have been saying things like "they need to get it together" or "the game's going downhill" or "if they don't do this the game won't be around much longer." And yet, MCOC is a nine year old game that is still making hundreds of millions of dollars a year with hundreds of thousands of active players and millions of people still downloading the game and is still in active development. How many of those are there? And what do I attribute that to? I don't think it is the game play, there are lots of games with similar game play. And not the Marvel license: over the time I've been playing MCOC the graveyard of dead Marvel games is filled beyond capacity. In my opinion, its the game economy. The thing that people complain about the most, that people say Kabam is most out of touch about, that no one thinks Kabam ever gets right, is probably its single biggest strength, and always has been. That's the thing I wouldn't trust in any other hands, especially any player who thinks they know better.
Is this a joke response? I genuinely can't tell 🤣
I've been playing this game for the past 8 years, I speak to people who have also been playing the game for just as long, I follow countless content creators, see the forums on a daily basis and the people who are invested (the people who spend and keep the game alive) generally have the exact same/very similar consensus on things.
The things that Kabam had control over, just offers, cyber weekend offers, banquet event, new aw tactic, BG nodes, potions update, lack of store updates, lack of rewards updates are almost all received negatively by the players that actually have experience, spend money and have a right to have an opinion.
You're telling me all this is exactly how the game should be run? In a way which the most valued players aren't happy with Kabams decision?
I'm saying the games dying or anything like that in the slightest, what am I saying is Kabam is obviously ignoring the player base. example; last BG season had extremely low scores for the GC brackets, current war season has Masters level alliances not even trying which is a combination of **** nodes that the 'devs are happy about' and the extortionate potion situation and now Banquet event has had one the lowest spend in recent years as we can see from 2nd and 1st spending less than 100k between them compared to 120k for just one person last year.
Kabam have done some great things this year, but can and should be doing so much better... and every month they're being told by the player base what they want and getting feedback that goes unheard 🤷♂️
There's also another fundamental flaw with this line of thinking, and in my 9 years, I've seen it made endless times concerning Offers. Kabam has reiterated many, many times that not all Offers will appeal to all Players. This isn't some kind of copy-and-paste response. Some Offers are quite literally not meant to appeal to all Players. There's a tendency to think that everything is targeted at where we're personally at, and if we think it's garbage then it must be garbage for everyone. The belief is because we're the "most experienced", then we know what's best for all Players. This is a bit misguided because we don't speak for where all Players are at, and we can't speak for what appeals to all Players. One person's s&#^ is another person's stepping stone. Popular opinion only goes so far, and you need to take the demographic into account, and where they're at in the game.
Kabam NEED to get things together, maybe hire someone who is at High Paragon/Valiant level to have an input on this or actually listen to the content creators feedback.
The idea that if only Kabam listened to "us" things would be better is hilariously naive. Not only do they have players of all progressions in the CCP who they listen to constantly, they have a similar range of employees actively involved in these decisions. They've hired top tier players as well.
As someone who converses with the developers regularly, and sees the chatter between players in the CCP and elsewhere, the notion that there's a bunch of insulated Kabam developers hopelessly ignorant of the genius players who could fix their game if only they listened to them is a hysterical fiction. First of all, there's no general consensus about how the rewards should work in the game, or for that matter anything else. There are players who think the banquet was hopelessly lame. There are players of all progressions who think it was perfectly fine. There are developers who think it should be different than what it was. Reasonable people can have differing opinions and perspectives on how these things should work, and what we get, not just with the banquet but everywhere, is a consensus compromise between a lot of different requirements and priorities, adjudicated by the designers who ultimately have to make the final decisions on things.
There's no voice here that is unrepresented there. When people here say Kabam should listen, they don't actually mean listen. They mean obey. And when they say they should listen to "the players" they almost always have one particular player in mind. I don't agree with every decision Kabam makes, and there's been many times I've been critical of certain aspects of the game, but there's no group of players I can think of that I would vote to hand control of the future of the game to, outside of the hands it is currently in.
And not because I think they are better players or smarter designers or anything like that. Just because they have the track record. For years people have been saying things like "they need to get it together" or "the game's going downhill" or "if they don't do this the game won't be around much longer." And yet, MCOC is a nine year old game that is still making hundreds of millions of dollars a year with hundreds of thousands of active players and millions of people still downloading the game and is still in active development. How many of those are there? And what do I attribute that to? I don't think it is the game play, there are lots of games with similar game play. And not the Marvel license: over the time I've been playing MCOC the graveyard of dead Marvel games is filled beyond capacity. In my opinion, its the game economy. The thing that people complain about the most, that people say Kabam is most out of touch about, that no one thinks Kabam ever gets right, is probably its single biggest strength, and always has been. That's the thing I wouldn't trust in any other hands, especially any player who thinks they know better.
Is this a joke response? I genuinely can't tell 🤣
I've been playing this game for the past 8 years, I speak to people who have also been playing the game for just as long, I follow countless content creators, see the forums on a daily basis and the people who are invested (the people who spend and keep the game alive) generally have the exact same/very similar consensus on things.
The things that Kabam had control over, just offers, cyber weekend offers, banquet event, new aw tactic, BG nodes, potions update, lack of store updates, lack of rewards updates are almost all received negatively by the players that actually have experience, spend money and have a right to have an opinion.
You're telling me all this is exactly how the game should be run? In a way which the most valued players aren't happy with Kabams decision?
I'm saying the games dying or anything like that in the slightest, what am I saying is Kabam is obviously ignoring the player base. example; last BG season had extremely low scores for the GC brackets, current war season has Masters level alliances not even trying which is a combination of **** nodes that the 'devs are happy about' and the extortionate potion situation and now Banquet event has had one the lowest spend in recent years as we can see from 2nd and 1st spending less than 100k between them compared to 120k for just one person last year.
Kabam have done some great things this year, but can and should be doing so much better... and every month they're being told by the player base what they want and getting feedback that goes unheard 🤷♂️
There's also another fundamental flaw with this line of thinking, and in my 9 years, I've seen it made endless times concerning Offers. Kabam has reiterated many, many times that not all Offers will appeal to all Players. This isn't some kind of copy-and-paste response. Some Offers are quite literally not meant to appeal to all Players. There's a tendency to think that everything is targeted at where we're personally at, and if we think it's garbage then it must be garbage for everyone. The belief is because we're the "most experienced", then we know what's best for all Players. This is a bit misguided because we don't speak for where all Players are at, and we can't speak for what appeals to all Players. One person's s&#^ is another person's stepping stone. Popular opinion only goes so far, and you need to take the demographic into account, and where they're at in the game.
Also, your defense of this company, regardless of what they do to their customers is actually what’s misguided. It’s like you believe the items that they themselves referred to as valueless somehow or worth tens of thousands of dollars. That makes sense brand new Alfa, Romeo, or one new rank to titan champion. 😂 only to get there. You don’t actually get anything even as valuable as the free floor mats they throw in. Because no one who is valiant, gives a **** about five and six star trash.
That's even worse than when I called Crashed a burning bush.
Tell me, how difficult it is to fix the potion price, how difficult it is to change the dropping rate of Banquet crystal, more difficult than design a champion?
What do you think the drop rates should have been for GGCs?
Many ppl gave very reasonable suggestions in many threads weeks ago, and I also said something in the comment you quoted, if you read.
Banquet is the past, so I just say it's poorly designed and I don't want to spend more times to explain how to fix it anymore, Banquet24 is a different story which is too early to discuss.
AW tactics and potion prices are still on going, there are also many threads include very good suggestions about how to fix, I don't want to spend more time to repeat those suggestions. Again, not my job, I just howl my concerns when I have time, if Kabam want to listen, there are plenty of answers out there already.
All that peacocking and this is what you come back with? Of course. You know better than Kabam but now you completely skirt the question. Nice.
As I said, I completed all endgame contents and I run a P1/master AQ(20-30) alliance for 6 years, I have an account with 22000+ PI, 3X7R3, so I know the game better than a lot of players. But at the end, it's a game not a job to me, I give my concerns and suggestions randomly when I have time, if nobody cares, so be it.
That's even worse than when I called Crashed a burning bush.
Tell me, how difficult it is to fix the potion price, how difficult it is to change the dropping rate of Banquet crystal, more difficult than design a champion?
What do you think the drop rates should have been for GGCs?
Many ppl gave very reasonable suggestions in many threads weeks ago, and I also said something in the comment you quoted, if you read.
Banquet is the past, so I just say it's poorly designed and I don't want to spend more times to explain how to fix it anymore, Banquet24 is a different story which is too early to discuss.
AW tactics and potion prices are still on going, there are also many threads include very good suggestions about how to fix, I don't want to spend more time to repeat those suggestions. Again, not my job, I just howl my concerns when I have time, if Kabam want to listen, there are plenty of answers out there already.
All that peacocking and this is what you come back with? Of course. You know better than Kabam but now you completely skirt the question. Nice.
As I said, I completed all endgame contents and I run a P1/master AQ(20-30) alliance for 6 years, I have an account with 22000+ PI, 3X7R3, so I know the game better than a lot of players. But at the end, it's a game not a job to me, I give my concerns and suggestions randomly when I have time, if nobody cares, so be it.
Still failing to answer the question.
what is your question again? you probably are not as important as you think you are
I personally love when Kabam tells me what content I should be focused on for rewards. Makes the game so fun when they try to force game modes that I don't like, such as Battlegrounds and Everest content.
Not a fan of this either. Fine we all did the completion run, fun community death event that was worth it even if you didn’t have the right champs. But then to say - well, use your left over units to start exploring necropolis whether you have the roster or not because the banquet isn’t for you..
That’s not what I consider a fun time in mobile game. My lone run through necropolis didn’t convert me to Everest enjoyment…. Especially when the champion acquisition didn’t do anything to help me complete more paths with less revives.
The second is that, despite a negative response from our engaged community, Banquet 2023 was broadly very successful. I’ll be honest, after seeing the initial reaction on these forums I was pretty worried. But in the end, players opened a lot of Banquet Crystals, approximately 34% more than last year. Part of this was that players had more Units going into the event this year, but a bigger reason was that, despite common belief, the Banquet event is actually one of our most broad-based sales events of the year - it’s one of our least top heavy events in terms of the percentage of participation coming from the top players. I know this is counterintuitive in some ways, given what it takes to climb the leaderboard, but it also makes sense when you think about how good the event was for lower-progression players. Broadly, the player base as a whole did think the Gifted Guardians crystal was worth completing the milestones for. So, if you want to argue the event was bad because it left many top players without the rewards they expected, by all means, make that argument, and I’m sympathetic to it. But if you want to argue it was bad because it wasn’t successful from the business and participation side you are going to lose that argument as it’s based on the false premise that the event failed, which it very much did not.
IMO, the biggest reason why this was a "success" was the unprecedented unit deals you released. Many got those deals because of the crystals and the huge increase in units/dollar and then used those units on GBCs. Had the packs had the normal number of units people wouldn't have bought more Odins to get more GBCs.
Basically, without those offers the 34% would be much lower.
Also, like mentioned above, you had to open more crystals to get the milestones so of course people would be opening more GBCs, lol.
Hey everyone. I thought this would be a good place to share some of my closing thoughts on Banquet this year. This is not me making excuses, but just trying to be as transparent as possible about what I and the others responsible for the event were thinking as we learn from it and move into 2024.
I want to start by saying the team absolutely understands your concerns and we do care about them. The part of our community that engages in dialogue on our forums, YouTube, Reddit and other social media represents a slice of our most engaged, long-term fans. We absolutely want to surprise and delight you, and in the case of Banquet 2023, it’s clear for many of you that didn’t happen.
I think there are a few reasons why things ended up this way. The first was, as I said on one of our livestreams, we wanted to do everything possible to encourage people to do Necropolis by moving rewards away from offers and into content. We tuned rewards through the end of this year and into the first part of next year accordingly. This was successful, our engagement with Necropolis has exceeded even our highest expectations. However I do agree, despite this, that portions of the Banquet event ended up undertuned, particularly the rank-up materials in the milestones and ranked rewards.
The second reason is that internally, we valued the limited pool 7-star Gifted Guardians crystal higher than a lot of you did. To us, it carried enough value that it would make the milestones worth it. Overall, the player base seems to have agreed (more on this later), but clearly for some that was not the case.
The third reason is, as many have said here and elsewhere, the Banquet event is the one event that isn’t separated by progression, and over time, the gap from low progression to high progression increases. I don’t think I need to say any more about this, you all seem to have identified this already.
The fourth reason is that the Banquet crystals themselves are deliberately designed to not be great for our top players, but I think aiming for a certain mix of filler and high-quality chase rewards we still ended up slightly undertuned. There will always be filler in these crystals, that’s just the reality of the situation. If a player doesn’t like that, then the event isn’t for them. However about 83% of the crystal was filler for top players this year, and I do agree that’s too high. We went through something similar last year with the inclusion of T4CC but I think that this year there was an additional challenge. For top players 6-star champion acquisition materials are basically worthless and 7-star shards were still too valuable to make up a meaningful portion of the crystal. Without champion acquisition options to fill up the crystal, we ended up in a tough place.
With that all said I do want to address a couple concerns that I don’t agree with. The first is this idea that the people who tune these events don’t understand the game. I have seen various suggestions that we should hire more high-tier players to work on this content. This wasn’t a problem in this case. Of the seven people who worked on this event, two of us were Valiant before the start of December, two are high Paragon players who have completed Necropolis, and the remaining three are all either Paragon or Thronebreaker. If anything, compared to the population of our players, our team is top-heavy. We knew generally where this event would land and that the event wasn’t as good for our end game players compared to last year, relative to the current state of the game. Again, I think the main difference in perception is the value we placed on the Gifted Guardians crystals. The value we placed on that crystal took up too much of the “reward budget” and directly resulted in the rank-up resources being undertuned in the milestones. We also could have included some T4A in ranked rewards below the top 90, and probably some more 6-star 4 to 5 rank-up gems.
The second is that, despite a negative response from our engaged community, Banquet 2023 was broadly very successful. I’ll be honest, after seeing the initial reaction on these forums I was pretty worried. But in the end, players opened a lot of Banquet Crystals, approximately 34% more than last year. Part of this was that players had more Units going into the event this year, but a bigger reason was that, despite common belief, the Banquet event is actually one of our most broad-based sales events of the year - it’s one of our least top heavy events in terms of the percentage of participation coming from the top players. I know this is counterintuitive in some ways, given what it takes to climb the leaderboard, but it also makes sense when you think about how good the event was for lower-progression players. Broadly, the player base as a whole did think the Gifted Guardians crystal was worth completing the milestones for. So, if you want to argue the event was bad because it left many top players without the rewards they expected, by all means, make that argument, and I’m sympathetic to it. But if you want to argue it was bad because it wasn’t successful from the business and participation side you are going to lose that argument as it’s based on the false premise that the event failed, which it very much did not.
Finally, bringing things back to the question at hand: Are Kabam devs happy with the Banquet results? I can’t speak for everyone on the team, but I would say overall I’m neutral. On the plus side, we got more players into Necropolis, had a successful event with broad-based participation, and didn’t substantially devalue very much economically aside from the six Gifted Guardians. We still have a huge roster of unreleased 7-star champions, rank 3 materials and other champion items like sig stones and awakening gems that are holding substantial value. You could see a world where Banquet introduced 7-star awakening gems or sig stones, and it made more money in the short term, and players were happier, but long-term we were in worse shape. On the downside, a lot of our most engaged players are pretty unhappy right now, with the Banquet event compounding concerns about Alliance War, defender AI, the meta event and other legitimate issues we need to address. What I can say in closing is that we are listening and we are learning. We aim to surprise and delight as many of you as possible as we get into this new year.
I gotta be honest here, I wasn't expecting a response like this one (especially after all the feedback from that part of the playerbase that felt alienated) so thank you. Two things I want to say: one I'm glad you guys are acknowledging the issue here and why so many of us were disappointed. It wasn't that the event was terrible in general, it simply wasn't good enough for endgame players, lower players obviously still got all their money's worth. Two, I think releasing Necropolis so close to Banquet was a bad idea in general. Both of them are a huge deal, and most of the players would've wanted to do both for obvious reasons. Necropolis, Abyss 2.0 but without bs nodes and Banquet well, it was great last year so of course endgame players had high hopes. What you guys did was basically make us choose one of them (if you can even call it choosing cause I don't think we even had a choice, the difference in rewards was just off the charts and Necropolis was the obvious choice) but I wanted both, and I'm sure most players did too.
What got me is that they released Necro in November, which gave the new Valiant title, then didn't reward the few players who got Valiant in the Banquet. An extra milestone or two for Val players, that would have been tuned for the most end-game players, would have gone a long way.
I'm still wondering what had to be fixed with the GBC Drop Rates.
That's because you're not an endgame player. The Banquet was great for TBs and new Paragons that still value 6* champs.
For one thing, the value of a 6* hasn't changed. Unless you can Max Sig a 7*, which isn't that common. The Event was more centered around rarity than highest value. They acknowledged that didn't hit the mark with some, but there are many other Players that weren't offended and were just content as it was. Myself and others included. Therein lies the problem. You can't make everyone happy, and if you tune it to meet the needs of the highest Players, you're throwing the balance of Resources off for the lower ones. I'm not going to bother responding to the quip aspect of this comment, but I will say that this has nothing to do with what I was saying. The Drop Rates weren't broken to be fixed. They were working as intended. That's not the same as wanting them to be higher.
I'm still wondering what had to be fixed with the GBC Drop Rates.
That's because you're not an endgame player. The Banquet was great for TBs and new Paragons that still value 6* champs.
For one thing, the value of a 6* hasn't changed. Unless you can Max Sig a 7*, which isn't that common. The Event was more centered around rarity than highest value. They acknowledged that didn't hit the mark with some, but there are many other Players that weren't offended and were just content as it was. Myself and others included. Therein lies the problem. You can't make everyone happy, and if you tune it to meet the needs of the highest Players, you're throwing the balance of Resources off for the lower ones. I'm not going to bother responding to the quip aspect of this comment, but I will say that this has nothing to do with what I was saying. The Drop Rates weren't broken to be fixed. They were working as intended. That's not the same as wanting them to be higher.
You're just proving my point. You don't even realize how much the value of 6* champs has dropped for endgame players, lol.
I'm still wondering what had to be fixed with the GBC Drop Rates.
That's because you're not an endgame player. The Banquet was great for TBs and new Paragons that still value 6* champs.
For one thing, the value of a 6* hasn't changed. Unless you can Max Sig a 7*, which isn't that common. The Event was more centered around rarity than highest value. They acknowledged that didn't hit the mark with some, but there are many other Players that weren't offended and were just content as it was. Myself and others included. Therein lies the problem. You can't make everyone happy, and if you tune it to meet the needs of the highest Players, you're throwing the balance of Resources off for the lower ones. I'm not going to bother responding to the quip aspect of this comment, but I will say that this has nothing to do with what I was saying. The Drop Rates weren't broken to be fixed. They were working as intended. That's not the same as wanting them to be higher.
You're just proving my point. You don't even realize how much the value of 6* champs has dropped for endgame players, lol.
What point? That people write off everything else after the newest shiny thing comes? I'm quite aware of the premature blindness, thanks.
It’s not just endgame players. Once you have a stacked roster of 6*, the value of new 6* characters really goes down dramatically. I used to open those crystals all the time - now I’m just sitting on the shards.
I'm not interested in arguing. I get that people weren't enticed by it at that stage. So does Kabam. I just don't agree that the entire Event was a wash, and evidently it wasn't if Players bought as many Crystals as they did. I also disagree that the value of 6*s has changed as drastically as is implied. There's a difference between what I choose to focus on and the actual value in the meta, and we've had a handful of R3s introduced. Some may have one, two, three maybe? That's not enough to phase them out at this stage.
It’s not just endgame players. Once you have a stacked roster of 6*, the value of new 6* characters really goes down dramatically. I used to open those crystals all the time - now I’m just sitting on the shards.
I personally love when Kabam tells me what content I should be focused on for rewards. Makes the game so fun when they try to force game modes that I don't like, such as Battlegrounds and Everest content.
Not a fan of this either. Fine we all did the completion run, fun community death event that was worth it even if you didn’t have the right champs. But then to say - well, use your left over units to start exploring necropolis whether you have the roster or not because the banquet isn’t for you..
That’s not what I consider a fun time in mobile game. My lone run through necropolis didn’t convert me to Everest enjoyment…. Especially when the champion acquisition didn’t do anything to help me complete more paths with less revives.
Couldn't agree more. Everest content in this game almost always sucks to me. 1 run of too many mega noded fights for completion and multiple runs for exploration isn't fun for me. One completion run was all I would be able to stand. Thankfully, that gets me the bulk of the rewards that I care about if the death event is also considered an additional completion reward.
To keep it 100% real, I think I consider this Banquet not too bad just because I pulled a 7 star Thanos and got all of the 7star Gifted Guardians. More 7star shards, more 4 -> 5 gems/crystals, more sig 200 gems/crystals, and some special relics would have sweetened it for me.
That's even worse than when I called Crashed a burning bush.
Tell me, how difficult it is to fix the potion price, how difficult it is to change the dropping rate of Banquet crystal, more difficult than design a champion?
What do you think the drop rates should have been for GGCs?
Many ppl gave very reasonable suggestions in many threads weeks ago, and I also said something in the comment you quoted, if you read.
Banquet is the past, so I just say it's poorly designed and I don't want to spend more times to explain how to fix it anymore, Banquet24 is a different story which is too early to discuss.
AW tactics and potion prices are still on going, there are also many threads include very good suggestions about how to fix, I don't want to spend more time to repeat those suggestions. Again, not my job, I just howl my concerns when I have time, if Kabam want to listen, there are plenty of answers out there already.
All that peacocking and this is what you come back with? Of course. You know better than Kabam but now you completely skirt the question. Nice.
As I said, I completed all endgame contents and I run a P1/master AQ(20-30) alliance for 6 years, I have an account with 22000+ PI, 3X7R3, so I know the game better than a lot of players. But at the end, it's a game not a job to me, I give my concerns and suggestions randomly when I have time, if nobody cares, so be it.
Still failing to answer the question.
what is your question again? you probably are not as important as you think you are
And you can't understand why no one listens to your "suggestions".
Hey everyone. I thought this would be a good place to share some of my closing thoughts on Banquet this year. This is not me making excuses, but just trying to be as transparent as possible about what I and the others responsible for the event were thinking as we learn from it and move into 2024.
I want to start by saying the team absolutely understands your concerns and we do care about them. The part of our community that engages in dialogue on our forums, YouTube, Reddit and other social media represents a slice of our most engaged, long-term fans. We absolutely want to surprise and delight you, and in the case of Banquet 2023, it’s clear for many of you that didn’t happen.
I think there are a few reasons why things ended up this way. The first was, as I said on one of our livestreams, we wanted to do everything possible to encourage people to do Necropolis by moving rewards away from offers and into content. We tuned rewards through the end of this year and into the first part of next year accordingly. This was successful, our engagement with Necropolis has exceeded even our highest expectations. However I do agree, despite this, that portions of the Banquet event ended up undertuned, particularly the rank-up materials in the milestones and ranked rewards.
The second reason is that internally, we valued the limited pool 7-star Gifted Guardians crystal higher than a lot of you did. To us, it carried enough value that it would make the milestones worth it. Overall, the player base seems to have agreed (more on this later), but clearly for some that was not the case.
The third reason is, as many have said here and elsewhere, the Banquet event is the one event that isn’t separated by progression, and over time, the gap from low progression to high progression increases. I don’t think I need to say any more about this, you all seem to have identified this already.
The fourth reason is that the Banquet crystals themselves are deliberately designed to not be great for our top players, but I think aiming for a certain mix of filler and high-quality chase rewards we still ended up slightly undertuned. There will always be filler in these crystals, that’s just the reality of the situation. If a player doesn’t like that, then the event isn’t for them. However about 83% of the crystal was filler for top players this year, and I do agree that’s too high. We went through something similar last year with the inclusion of T4CC but I think that this year there was an additional challenge. For top players 6-star champion acquisition materials are basically worthless and 7-star shards were still too valuable to make up a meaningful portion of the crystal. Without champion acquisition options to fill up the crystal, we ended up in a tough place.
With that all said I do want to address a couple concerns that I don’t agree with. The first is this idea that the people who tune these events don’t understand the game. I have seen various suggestions that we should hire more high-tier players to work on this content. This wasn’t a problem in this case. Of the seven people who worked on this event, two of us were Valiant before the start of December, two are high Paragon players who have completed Necropolis, and the remaining three are all either Paragon or Thronebreaker. If anything, compared to the population of our players, our team is top-heavy. We knew generally where this event would land and that the event wasn’t as good for our end game players compared to last year, relative to the current state of the game. Again, I think the main difference in perception is the value we placed on the Gifted Guardians crystals. The value we placed on that crystal took up too much of the “reward budget” and directly resulted in the rank-up resources being undertuned in the milestones. We also could have included some T4A in ranked rewards below the top 90, and probably some more 6-star 4 to 5 rank-up gems.
The second is that, despite a negative response from our engaged community, Banquet 2023 was broadly very successful. I’ll be honest, after seeing the initial reaction on these forums I was pretty worried. But in the end, players opened a lot of Banquet Crystals, approximately 34% more than last year. Part of this was that players had more Units going into the event this year, but a bigger reason was that, despite common belief, the Banquet event is actually one of our most broad-based sales events of the year - it’s one of our least top heavy events in terms of the percentage of participation coming from the top players. I know this is counterintuitive in some ways, given what it takes to climb the leaderboard, but it also makes sense when you think about how good the event was for lower-progression players. Broadly, the player base as a whole did think the Gifted Guardians crystal was worth completing the milestones for. So, if you want to argue the event was bad because it left many top players without the rewards they expected, by all means, make that argument, and I’m sympathetic to it. But if you want to argue it was bad because it wasn’t successful from the business and participation side you are going to lose that argument as it’s based on the false premise that the event failed, which it very much did not.
Finally, bringing things back to the question at hand: Are Kabam devs happy with the Banquet results? I can’t speak for everyone on the team, but I would say overall I’m neutral. On the plus side, we got more players into Necropolis, had a successful event with broad-based participation, and didn’t substantially devalue very much economically aside from the six Gifted Guardians. We still have a huge roster of unreleased 7-star champions, rank 3 materials and other champion items like sig stones and awakening gems that are holding substantial value. You could see a world where Banquet introduced 7-star awakening gems or sig stones, and it made more money in the short term, and players were happier, but long-term we were in worse shape. On the downside, a lot of our most engaged players are pretty unhappy right now, with the Banquet event compounding concerns about Alliance War, defender AI, the meta event and other legitimate issues we need to address. What I can say in closing is that we are listening and we are learning. We aim to surprise and delight as many of you as possible as we get into this new year.
This is one of the best dev posts I have ever read. Sure, Kabam(and every other game dev team) makes mis-steps. Most games I have played, concerns of the player base are met with deafening silence, or doubling down. A post like this just shows how much passion and care the game team has for us players.
As far as this years event goes. As a Valiant player. Did I love it? Not really. For the first year ever I just hit all the solo milestones and then stopped pretty much. Was it still "fun"? Sure it was.. It was something extra to do in game with extra rewards for spending units and cash. Even though I didn't get Diablo and Shocker, the two champs I actually wanted from those crystals. I still had a good enough time. This game is my only RL hobby, so I do not mind throwing down some cash on it. Do I hope that next year this event is progression based? Yes, please!
That's even worse than when I called Crashed a burning bush.
Tell me, how difficult it is to fix the potion price, how difficult it is to change the dropping rate of Banquet crystal, more difficult than design a champion?
What do you think the drop rates should have been for GGCs?
Many ppl gave very reasonable suggestions in many threads weeks ago, and I also said something in the comment you quoted, if you read.
Banquet is the past, so I just say it's poorly designed and I don't want to spend more times to explain how to fix it anymore, Banquet24 is a different story which is too early to discuss.
AW tactics and potion prices are still on going, there are also many threads include very good suggestions about how to fix, I don't want to spend more time to repeat those suggestions. Again, not my job, I just howl my concerns when I have time, if Kabam want to listen, there are plenty of answers out there already.
All that peacocking and this is what you come back with? Of course. You know better than Kabam but now you completely skirt the question. Nice.
As I said, I completed all endgame contents and I run a P1/master AQ(20-30) alliance for 6 years, I have an account with 22000+ PI, 3X7R3, so I know the game better than a lot of players. But at the end, it's a game not a job to me, I give my concerns and suggestions randomly when I have time, if nobody cares, so be it.
Still failing to answer the question.
what is your question again? you probably are not as important as you think you are
And you can't understand why no one listens to your "suggestions".
I've said for many times, I'm just a player and throw out my concerns and suggestions when I have time, I do what I can for the community. If Kabam don't listen or don't agree, so be it, not my job. I wouldn't be upset or angry.
That's even worse than when I called Crashed a burning bush.
Tell me, how difficult it is to fix the potion price, how difficult it is to change the dropping rate of Banquet crystal, more difficult than design a champion?
What do you think the drop rates should have been for GGCs?
Many ppl gave very reasonable suggestions in many threads weeks ago, and I also said something in the comment you quoted, if you read.
Banquet is the past, so I just say it's poorly designed and I don't want to spend more times to explain how to fix it anymore, Banquet24 is a different story which is too early to discuss.
AW tactics and potion prices are still on going, there are also many threads include very good suggestions about how to fix, I don't want to spend more time to repeat those suggestions. Again, not my job, I just howl my concerns when I have time, if Kabam want to listen, there are plenty of answers out there already.
All that peacocking and this is what you come back with? Of course. You know better than Kabam but now you completely skirt the question. Nice.
As I said, I completed all endgame contents and I run a P1/master AQ(20-30) alliance for 6 years, I have an account with 22000+ PI, 3X7R3, so I know the game better than a lot of players. But at the end, it's a game not a job to me, I give my concerns and suggestions randomly when I have time, if nobody cares, so be it.
Still failing to answer the question.
what is your question again? you probably are not as important as you think you are
@Kabam Crashed your response is possibly the best response I’ve read on the forums. I didn’t expect this thread would get any response except maybe a very short defensive one. It was really insightful to hear. Thank you.
From my point of view, I didn't enjoy Banquet 2023, but fixing it isn't as simple as what some players are saying.
"Make it progression tiered!" Ok, but now you are impacting players who only spend in the Banquet since that is their only chance to get stuff beyond their progression level. If every other event is progression tier, and this historically has not been, then this is is the only chance for a lower tier player to 'catch up' to medium/higher tier players. Higher tier players may argue that they shouldn't be able to catch up without putting in the work, which has some merit, but also, since this is a game, is not really a definitive reason. Players may feel that work should be rewarded compared to someone joining the game and blowing $100k dollars for the same result, but that is just a feeling and not a true good reason. Additionally, how do you Progression tier it across crystals, Solo milestones, and Alliance Milestones? This requires a major rethinking of the event, and isn't just a simple fix.
"Change the RNG of the crystal"! Ok, but what should it be? If you bump up the 7-star stuff from 1% to 3% chance, then that means that the high spenders now have a drastically higher chance of having full 7-star rosters, compared to FTP players. This has knock on effects to Battlegrounds (where players already complain about matchmaking) and how difficult content is designed.
"Make a special crystal available to higher Progression players"! Ok, but what is the price, what is in the crystal, and how many points should it contribute to the milestones? If it is worth 600 units, should the purchasing and opening generate twice as many points towards milestones? If yes, why should you get more points towards milestones, if theoretically what is inside the crystal is more valuable? If yes, how is that fair for Alliances that have a greater ratio of Valiant and Paragon compared to Alliances with a lower ratio of Valiant and Paragons? [My personal idea would be to have a Nexus GBC available to Valiant/Paragon for 500 units, but have the same points toward milestones and same rng items. That way, they can spend more and can at least pick something they'd be least unhappy with, without unbalancing the rest of the event. But, since Kabam got rid of the scrap from last year that provided players with choice of what to get, maybe it is not a good idea]
Players should make suggestions, but realize that not all of them have merit, and that even the ones with merit, require a ton more questions and answers to be resolved before implementing them.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I hope these sentiments actually make it into the development of future events and content. I also hope the top end players realize there needs to be a balance between rewarding their longevity and welcoming new players. The game can’t survive longterm without a catchup event every now and then since every single game mode is setup for the rich getter richer.
I also agree and thank you for Necropolis. Not just the rewards, but the content itself. I have never been in a position to tackle Everest content at release in the past and it was quite the experience rushing in. I’m happy I dropped 2,500 units there instead of putting that towards more GBCs.
My only gripe with this response is that the acknowledgment of a lack of r4 and r5 materials took so long. Giving players in the top 5% an r5 wouldn’t break the game. In itself it’s not even enough to be Paragon, and it certainly wouldn’t help anyone take over AW or Battlegrounds leaderboards. This is all the vast majority of the early feedback asked for. More T6B, T3A, and T6C. No one was asking for 7* awakening gems or 7* sig stones. No one thought they should be able to become Valiant from this event.
Comments
This event missed the mark on the "WOW" aspect. There wasn't a single reward that would have me stare at the pull like "whoa, did that just happen???" I am no endgame player either (still Paragon, ca. 10 7*s, not a single r2/3), so if I look at my goals and their fulfillment:
Did I move toward new highest rank? No.
Did I obtain rankup mats to improve my top champs? No.
Did I get something, I would otherwise struggle to obtain? No.
I spent 5300 units total, in hopes of at least expanding my roster a bit. And I don't really feel like that happened.
Ironically, when I sat down to do SQ and a bit of 8.2 exploration during the holidays, I obtained comparable value of items, as I got from Banquet.
1-encourage player to play necropolis? What does that mean? Couldn't we delay our necropolis exploration? Like I did?
Necropolis is permanent 😅
2- yeah gifted guardian crystal may be very valuable, or at least it would have been without sandman in the pool. That crystal was the main reason why I played banquet this year, in the hope of find adam warlock, instead I got a f****** sandman, my god.
So, good but still not enough imo
3- The fact that ppl overall opened more crystal that last year is obvious, you needed to open more than last year to get all the milestones. I don't think these numbers match reality about how community feel with this event.
4- it was really undertuned, personally I expected at least more r4 and r5 material in milestones and low rank rewards
Personally I play what I find fun to play, so, banquet last year was fun and I gave it a chance this year... I don't say I regret but.... I am a bit disappointed (especially cause I pulled sandman lmao, wouldn't complain if I had pull one of the other 5 champs 🤣)
Now he didn't say why but we all know why: cyber weekend was a disappointment as well. And even if banquet was a disappointment for most, we know most people have difficulties saving their hard earned units till let's say next 4th July event and just went for the banquet anyway. (I personally chose to save for longer cause the ceiling for offers is no longer 18k and we're going to see the first valiant offers next July).
So I think what happened is a combination of : harder to reach milestones + massive amount of units available as a consequence of disappointing cyber weekend.
You purposely created an event that was not intended for top players who are also your top spenders? And do you think that’s good business? As you stated, the majority of your development team had already beat necropolis.
So you purposely released an event that you did not want top spenders or top players to compete in? After they have already beat necropolis(so you don’t want our money?)
Yet all the ranked rewards or geared towards mega spenders. So you’re essentially saying anybody who wants top rewards that’s a top player needs to spend top dollars. But he’s going to get nothing but garbage along the way. To these highly exclusive and rare items. Anyone who falls short wasted THOUSANDS of dollars because you offered nothing but trash along the way!
As a Valiant player, how useful are six star signature stones to you?
nothing that you said actually contains a logical reason why your company decided to release an ALLIANCE event that promotes spending and doesn’t reward the top one percent of spenders
In which way is this a success? Is it a success because the top player spent like 25% of what the top performers last year Spent?
Is it a success because 90% of your customer base is upset or at the very least disappointed?
Maybe it’s a success because you made millions of dollars and nobody actually got anything that forwarded their roster in any meaningful way? Ding ding there it is .. I keep forgetting that you are a gambling institution disguised as a video game. And the main goal is to get as many players to the table as possible. But just like Vegas, you don’t want anybody to feel like they won. Psychologically they need to be hungry and want to still keep on playing, hoping that the next spin is going to be the magical won the rewards them.
This is a sad, unscrupulous way to run a business. And as a company since every single thing you have is actually valueless you could’ve decided to make your customers happy by giving them “valueless items” that actually advance their progression instead
But that’s not how you operate. Instead, you’re probably happy hearing that players that only make $20 an hour in the real world like most of my friends. Spent a weeks or a month’s pay trying to help their alliance and hopefully their own progression, silly them I guess because kabam says this was a success.
Most businesses, don’t operate on the principle of trying to get as much from their customers as they can while giving their customers as little as possible
Congrats you’ve outdone yourselves
I eagerly await all of the apologist to shred me insult me, while a company I myself just gave enough money to rank in top 600 stands by and does nothing (even though it’s against your terms of service to insult fellow players on the forums) proving again that the customer means nothing only the money they collect from them on the limited time they play the game matters.
You keep referring to “all”
In defense of kabams response.
You do realize that in that response, they said
“the Banquet event is the one event that isn’t separated by progression” this literally means that it applies to all players. It’s not separated by progression levels. Which means that the people at every level of progression should be able to benefit from the event. That includes people at the top and bottom, which is the definition of the word all.
Unless you are ignorant enough in all your bountiful wisdom, to believe that beginner players are the ones collecting the top rewards.
Because if you don’t believe that, then you, in fact know the top players and spenders are the ones that are going to get top rewards. And if you know that, then you also know that they are spending thousands of dollars and collecting nothing but garbage along their way to the top.
So you’re OK with the idea that if someone wants to rank three champ they should have to spend $50,000 to do it if they’ve already beaten necropolis. And that’s actually all they’ll get because five star items and six*signature stones don’t make a difference to somebody with multiple rank threes and dozens of seven*champions.
That’s not what I consider a fun time in mobile game. My lone run through necropolis didn’t convert me to Everest enjoyment…. Especially when the champion acquisition didn’t do anything to help me complete more paths with less revives.
Basically, without those offers the 34% would be much lower.
Also, like mentioned above, you had to open more crystals to get the milestones so of course people would be opening more GBCs, lol.
The Event was more centered around rarity than highest value. They acknowledged that didn't hit the mark with some, but there are many other Players that weren't offended and were just content as it was. Myself and others included. Therein lies the problem. You can't make everyone happy, and if you tune it to meet the needs of the highest Players, you're throwing the balance of Resources off for the lower ones.
I'm not going to bother responding to the quip aspect of this comment, but I will say that this has nothing to do with what I was saying. The Drop Rates weren't broken to be fixed. They were working as intended. That's not the same as wanting them to be higher.
I just don't agree that the entire Event was a wash, and evidently it wasn't if Players bought as many Crystals as they did.
I also disagree that the value of 6*s has changed as drastically as is implied. There's a difference between what I choose to focus on and the actual value in the meta, and we've had a handful of R3s introduced. Some may have one, two, three maybe? That's not enough to phase them out at this stage.
To keep it 100% real, I think I consider this Banquet not too bad just because I pulled a 7 star Thanos and got all of the 7star Gifted Guardians. More 7star shards, more 4 -> 5 gems/crystals, more sig 200 gems/crystals, and some special relics would have sweetened it for me.
As far as this years event goes. As a Valiant player. Did I love it? Not really. For the first year ever I just hit all the solo milestones and then stopped pretty much. Was it still "fun"? Sure it was.. It was something extra to do in game with extra rewards for spending units and cash. Even though I didn't get Diablo and Shocker, the two champs I actually wanted from those crystals. I still had a good enough time. This game is my only RL hobby, so I do not mind throwing down some cash on it. Do I hope that next year this event is progression based? Yes, please!
From my point of view, I didn't enjoy Banquet 2023, but fixing it isn't as simple as what some players are saying.
"Make it progression tiered!"
Ok, but now you are impacting players who only spend in the Banquet since that is their only chance to get stuff beyond their progression level. If every other event is progression tier, and this historically has not been, then this is is the only chance for a lower tier player to 'catch up' to medium/higher tier players. Higher tier players may argue that they shouldn't be able to catch up without putting in the work, which has some merit, but also, since this is a game, is not really a definitive reason. Players may feel that work should be rewarded compared to someone joining the game and blowing $100k dollars for the same result, but that is just a feeling and not a true good reason.
Additionally, how do you Progression tier it across crystals, Solo milestones, and Alliance Milestones? This requires a major rethinking of the event, and isn't just a simple fix.
"Change the RNG of the crystal"!
Ok, but what should it be? If you bump up the 7-star stuff from 1% to 3% chance, then that means that the high spenders now have a drastically higher chance of having full 7-star rosters, compared to FTP players. This has knock on effects to Battlegrounds (where players already complain about matchmaking) and how difficult content is designed.
"Make a special crystal available to higher Progression players"!
Ok, but what is the price, what is in the crystal, and how many points should it contribute to the milestones? If it is worth 600 units, should the purchasing and opening generate twice as many points towards milestones? If yes, why should you get more points towards milestones, if theoretically what is inside the crystal is more valuable? If yes, how is that fair for Alliances that have a greater ratio of Valiant and Paragon compared to Alliances with a lower ratio of Valiant and Paragons? [My personal idea would be to have a Nexus GBC available to Valiant/Paragon for 500 units, but have the same points toward milestones and same rng items. That way, they can spend more and can at least pick something they'd be least unhappy with, without unbalancing the rest of the event. But, since Kabam got rid of the scrap from last year that provided players with choice of what to get, maybe it is not a good idea]
Players should make suggestions, but realize that not all of them have merit, and that even the ones with merit, require a ton more questions and answers to be resolved before implementing them.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I hope these sentiments actually make it into the development of future events and content. I also hope the top end players realize there needs to be a balance between rewarding their longevity and welcoming new players. The game can’t survive longterm without a catchup event every now and then since every single game mode is setup for the rich getter richer.
I also agree and thank you for Necropolis. Not just the rewards, but the content itself. I have never been in a position to tackle Everest content at release in the past and it was quite the experience rushing in. I’m happy I dropped 2,500 units there instead of putting that towards more GBCs.
My only gripe with this response is that the acknowledgment of a lack of r4 and r5 materials took so long. Giving players in the top 5% an r5 wouldn’t break the game. In itself it’s not even enough to be Paragon, and it certainly wouldn’t help anyone take over AW or Battlegrounds leaderboards. This is all the vast majority of the early feedback asked for. More T6B, T3A, and T6C. No one was asking for 7* awakening gems or 7* sig stones. No one thought they should be able to become Valiant from this event.